The San Francisco Bay Area of Defiance

For some imagined worlds, the connection to their real-world counterparts is visibly close at hand. Trion Worlds‘ massively multiplayer online first-person shooter game Defiance launched today — and the Syfy television series that takes place in the same fictional world premieres April 15. The map below (linked from this forum thread) represents a portion of the game world, which is based at least partially on a terraformed (thus somewhat modified) San Francisco Bay Area. As the region is called “Madera,” it seems reasonable to assume it’s a fictionalized version of Corte Madera and environs — so we’ve included a Google satellite map of approximately the same area below.

Defiance is one of the most interesting transmedia projects going, as events in the show will have an active impact on the evolution of the persistent game-world (if not quite vice versa). Perhaps more interesting as cartographic artifacts are the two maps of the show we have included at the end of the post, one apparently displaying the local area of many of the show’s events, the other displaying the United States as it has evolved in Defiance’s future — a future we’re looking forward to experiencing in both media.